This is rather a sad book. It’s sad because, 25 years after the appearance of E. O. Wilson’s Sociobiology (a book of mere passing historical interest that no one I know has actually read for 20 years), the same people are still harping on about the same objections, as though nothing of any consequence had happened in the intervening years. But it’s also sad because, as one reads through most of its 15 chapters, one has the distinct sense of watching the social sciences slide inexorably into a postmodernist oblivion of their own making.

So here we have all the tired old clichés trotted out yet again. Sociobiologists as closet conservatives (a gratuitous insult to those many sociobiologists whose politics lie well to the left of most of this book’s contributors); evolutionary psychology as a modern version of Social Darwinism (as though there is some obvious link between the two that the naifs of evolutionary psychology have failed to recognise); evolutionary (or biological) anything as being synonymous with genetic determinism (what on earth has DNA got to do with Darwinism, or even Mendel for that matter?). I cannot believe that, 60 years after Julian Huxley spelled it out in words of one syllable in his Evolution: the Modern Synthesis, people are still confusing ontogeny with function.

And why, amid the rich panoply of theory and data that now adorns the evolutionary study of human behaviour, do we find mention of no more than half a dozen names throughout the whole book, most of whom have little or nothing to do with evolutionary psychology. Cosmides/Tooby (evolutionary psychologists to be sure, but in reality only the self-proclaimed gurus of one rather limited research programme), E. O. Wilson (never by any stretch of the imagination a leading light in this area), Richard Dawkins (another writer whose contributions to evolutionary psychology are, shall we say, thin), Dan Dennett (a philosopher), Steven Pinker (a psycholinguist much given to popularisations) and Robert Wright (a journalist, for heaven’s sake!) are the focus of attention, with Daly/Wilson (at last, someone who actually does something!) receiving only passing mention.

What is perhaps doubly disturbing here is the focus on popular writings as major sources, as though there was no difference between how one writes serious science for colleagues to read and how one writes books for the lay public to read. Perhaps there is no such distinction in the disciplines from which most of these contributors hail (social anthropology, science studies, sociology, philosophy, gender studies, architecture), but for disciplines that have to deal with genuinely difficult intellectual concepts the distinction is, alas, unavoidable. Intellectual courtesy might perhaps enjoin us to recognise that. What we are instead offered herein is hardly an intellectually rigorous overview of evolutionary psychology, never mind its sister discipline – and many would not even bother to draw the distinction – evolutionary anthropology. Worse still, it’s always helpful, when you quote folks’ work, to be sure that you don’t misunderstand it.

Nor is irony (that let-out clause for so much substandard intellectualism that runs under the rubric of postmodernism) an acceptable alternative – as though irony somehow exonerates you from any obligation to do your intellectual homework.

Although, to be fair, there is irony a-plenty – albeit, mostly unintended. Not a few bemoan the lack of a multidisciplinary approach to the study of the human condition … and then vigorously lambaste the evolutionary approach (perhaps the one discipline that unavoidably enjoins us to take a multidisciplinary approach) as entirely inappropriate and ill-conceived. There is the inevitable molecular biologist (perhaps the most reductionist and blinkered of all the biological disciplines) roundly castigating evolutionary psychologists for misunderstanding molecular genetics (as though molecular genetics had anything to do with organismic evolutionary biology and, in particular, behaviour).

All this makes the incongruously more sensible chapters by Patrick Bateson (on instincts and the nature/nurture debate in ethology) and Annette Karmiloff-Smith (on developmental psychology) a welcome respite. But aside from these, we seem to find here some entertaining examples of political commitment overriding the rigours of the scientific method, the perennial confusion between how one would like the world to be and how it actually is (as though the latter had anything to do with whether or not one should seek to change it), crassly naïve interpretations of claims made by evolutionary psychologists, the pitfalls that await those who insist on deriving their knowledge of other disciplines from secondary or even tertiary sources rather than devoting time to familiarising themselves with the primary literature and – dare I be so bold? – the intellectual indulgence of not having to subject one’s theorising to the unnecessary discipline of its having to be compatible with the empirical world.

It is difficult to see what the point of this self-indulgent book actually is. But it does remind one of just how stark are the problems we face in the public understanding of science. How can we expect lay men and women to understand modern developments in science when our professional colleagues so easily miss the point? The evidence of this book suggests that we often hugely underestimate the difficulty of this essential task.

Robin Dunbar
School of Biological Sciences
University of Liverpool